You Cannot Comprehend It

[dreammaster]

It's time to announce testing for a further two Glk subengines. The first is the Glulx interpreter, for which there are many free games available at the IF-Archive.

The second is the Comprehend engine games developed by Polarware. Here's where things get a bit more complicated. At the moment, only the first three Comprehend games are ready for testing - Transylvania, Crimson Crown, and OO-Topos. These three are also freely available at the IF-Archive. There is also, however, a re-release of Transylvania also available for free from the Graphics Magician website which isn't yet supported.

As for the other Comprehend games, Talisman will likely be supported in the future, but it requires significant further work. The other remaining games like Transylvania III use a completely different engine, so will remain out of scope for the foreseeable future.

So if any of you are interested, try downloading the relevant games and give them a try. You will need a daily development build. As always, please submit the bug reports to our issue tracker.

[eriktorbjorn]

These three are also freely available at the IF-Archive. There is also, however, a re-release of Transylvania also available for free from the Graphics Magician website which isn't yet supported.

Of the games on the Graphics Magician website (which, from what I understand, is run by the original Polarware/Penguin Software people?), is Transylvania the only one that's currently unsupported, or are there significant differences in OO-Topos and Crimson Crown as well?

[dreammaster]

Of the games on the Graphics Magician website (which, from what I understand, is run by the original Polarware/Penguin Software people?), is Transylvania the only one that's currently unsupported, or are there significant differences in OO-Topos and Crimson Crown as well?

From what I remember when I checked the other two out, they at least detected identically to the version on the if-archive, though I didn't bother with a full play-through or binary comparison of the individual files. I was originally hoping to support for Talisman done before I took a break for my Christmas holidays, so I really didn't spend much time on the matter.

[Roody]

I fell out of my usual habit of checking in on ScummVM regularly in 2020 and just recently thought to swing by again. Anyhow, I looked into this update yesterday, and wow, this is nice. Really cool to have the combination of the original graphics and modern fonts. As happy as I was to see IF support be added to ScummVM in the first place, I never expected ScummVM to be the best all-around choice of interpreter for playing any particular type of text game and it's great to see my expectations surpassed. Great work!